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I agree with RSIxidor. PETA might be a bunch of hypocritical assholes, but that doesn’t make animal cruelty any more right. I bet those two guys chortled at their own wit and incalculable masculinity for using what looks like automatic rifles to kill a bunch of rabbits (most of which, I’m sure, they’ll just leave to rot) and arranging them into a sign. Yea, good job, big guys. You really showed your qualities.

Shooting rabbits is not animal cruelty. Rabbits are pests. In areas where their natural predators have been chased off, they can breed out of control and need to have their population controlled.
I really doubt they were left to rot either. Rabbit meat if tasty and you can still make a few bucks by selling the pelts.

First of all, killing something is cruel because that something usually resents it. However, I agree that hunting for food is both natural and often necessary. This is just conjecture, but I don’t think that they were hunting for food. As for rabbits being pests – that is a purely anthropocentric and subjective opinion. They are a required part of the ecosystem. The only reason that they got out of control is, as RSIxidor mentioned, because humans have already disrupted the ecosystem to the point that it destabilized. Again, maybe I’m wrong and these rabbits were not left to rot, but judging from the appearance and behavior of the two chaps in the photo, I’ll bet a pretty penny that they are neither doing this for food nor for any sort of environmental cause (such as intelligently keeping rabbit population in check). Their big guns, smug posturing, and disrespectful humor all point to them being nothing more than a couple of pricks that want to seem badass for their ability to kill things and piss off an (admittedly unhelpful) environmental group. Please, if you can prove my assumptions wrong, do.

@RSIxidor
1) I am 100% sure that all of those would fit easily in any pickup truck. You can sell rabbit pelts for at least $20, so leaving them is just leaving money on the ground.
2)Wow, you can read someone’s mind from a blurry picture.
3)Maybe it would have been better if people didn’t create the problem in the first place. But they did, so now we have to deal with it. Letting animal populations run out of control will lead to MORE dead bunnies, not less.
BTW most top level predators (including Mountain Lions) are making a come back, so we must be doing something right.

You soft ass cry baby types have obvious never lived where rabbits rule the land. I dodge at least 7 rabbits on average every morning driving to work here in Colorado….and thats on the same street. They are pests in large numbers as previously stated, and one could kill just as many pictured in less than a few hours around here. I’m not saying bunny genocide is right or wrong, but it’s really not going to put them on the endangered species list any time soon.

Those creatures look like nothing more than your average rabbit or jack rabbit. If that’s thee case, these guys could spend the next decade of their combined lives hunting down as many of these animals as they could possibly find, and they would not put a dent into the population. There’s a reason the phrase “breed like a rabbit” exists.

You’re crazy if you don’t think you could fit all of those 45 or so rabbits in the picture inside of a car trunk, much less the bed of a pickup truck.

And let’s say, just for the sake argument, these guys are killing them just for fun and then leaving the carcasses alone. That would at least provide an easy meal for your more endangered species and protect any crops nearby.

And as for rabbit being pests, that’s pretty much a fact. Ask anybody who’s trying to grow cereal crops. Also, they’re attracted to pretty much any crop when it’s in the seedling phase.

Ask Australia about their rabbit issue, where they’re literally devouring swaths of vegetation that is leading to erosion(not to mention killing certain plants that are far more endangered than rabbits will probably ever be), which in turn leads to the soil polluting aquatic ecosytems, etc etc etc.

I know that a lot of animals are pests, entirely understood, regardless of what has or hasn’t happened to the predators. Some way to control their population is needed for some areas, I just wish there was a different way. But I can’t even smell meat cooking without a gag reflex, so that’s me.

I am sorry but this is not considered animal cruelty. I think peta should be concerned with furry nut cruelty… what is furry nut cruelty you ask? Well its when you have a hairy ass nut sack and you beat the hell out of them until they give up and spit out dna.. har har motha fuckers get a life

I’m not going to lower myself to just calling you names back, but I will defend my opinion. My assumptions are based on the facts I stated in the penultimate sentence of my post, and my invitation to prove me wrong was and still is open to anyone with rational conclusions to the contrary. As for my statement that rabbits are a natural part of the ecosystem – I still believe that is so. Annoyance of people wanting to protect their flower gardens aside, the only way animals or plants can be scientifically labelled as pests or weeds, respectively, is if they are invasive species that do not belong in an ecosystem and thus destabilize it (not including humans, since we wouldn’t label ourselves pests). Rabbits are part of the ecosystem and are depended upon by other creatures therein. If their natural predators happen to have been practically wiped out because they were once considered pests in their own right, that does not mean that their natural reproduction rate now makes them pests. My point is that while their levels should be kept in check, it should be done intelligently. People who spell out profanities with the corpses of their kills probably do not qualify to make good choices.

killing jews is not cruelty. jews=pests. since they have been chased out of their natural habitat they have been breeding like crazy and hording all of the moneys and entertainment if only some guy would come around and fix the pests…

@ Nemo Intermundorum
“Annoyance of people wanting to protect their flower gardens aside”

Again, cereal crops are a favorite of rabbits, and so are any plant in its seedling phase. Yes, they do enjoy destroying your average home garden, too.

Keep their levels in check “intelligently?” Shooting them with a rifle is probably the easiest, cheapest way to do such a thing for the average person.

And yes, if an animal’s reproduction rate has been unchecked due to a lack of its predators, or for any other reason, that animal effectively becomes a pest due to the imbalance in the ecosystem. How can you possibly even say otherwise? Yeah, it might not be the fault of the rabbits, but things are the way they are. Again, I refer you to Australia. Even though, in that case, I believe the rabbits were brought to the country by man. In any case, they’re killing off other species of plants and animals due to their overpopulation.

Would you, as a farmer, not shoot rabbits if they were threatening your own livelihood?

And none of your opinion is based on fact. You stated broad generalizations of these guys that you couldn’t possibly prove or back up with factual evidence. And all of this is based on a single picture of them you found on the Internet with a bunch of dead rabbits. You have not, in any way, proven anything you’ve said. You’ve simply stated your opinion ,and then used great, colorful words to back it up as fact. You can, in no way, by only looking at this picture tell me any real facts about these guys besides that they like to kill rabbits, they hate PETA, and they have rifles.

I, for instance, could claim that these guys are rabbit trainers and they’re just having their crew practice for their upcoming gig at 4H, and they’re carrying rifles with them because they’re protecting their group from wandering coyotes and vagabonds. There’s no way you could prove me wrong, either, just by going on this photo.

Rabbits are pests to farmers. Period. And overpopulating rabbits are even worse. Ask any Australian who has an awareness of his country’s ecological situation. Or just do the research yourself.

Of course, for that matter, most any animal that overpopulates is a pest.

but has anyone noticed that those rifles appear to have sound suppressors on them? either that or the largest compensators/flash suppressors ive ever seen. O_o well the rabbits do have big ears to be fair i guess

If the message was spelled out with bald eagles, it would be different. The poses of the guys, too, aren’t all Glorious Gaia-Raping Asshole, but more inviting to read the message.

PETA has the word ethical in its name, but it’s a simplistic ethic, and the consequences of being naive and blanket-protecting all animals is hands tied when it comes to managing animals that impact adversely on the ecosystem.

Here in the mountains rabbits and deer are pests to the extreme. The snow just melted and my yard is covered in Deer Shit and they’re always going in people’s garbage and making a mess. Not to mention the fact that people always run into them on the highway, generally killing both the deer and the human.

Of course in the past the wolves would have taken care of deer and rabbit, but they’ve been pushed deep into protected crown land so the herbivores can thrive on the edge of towns.

But suggest that maybe there should be limited, licenced deer hunting when the population is so out of control and people have a fit. Whatever.

Look, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t keep the little bastards in check, which is apparently what everyone is inferring from my statements. Yes, they are a problem because either humans have introduced them to islands where they don’t belong or simply turned their environment to shit. Unfortunately, the only ways to solve the resulting mess now is either to kill most of them off or to let them breed beyond the environment’s carrying capacity and starve to death. Obviously, the first solution is more preferable. In the case of their overbreeding in their own natural environement, there is a third even more preferable solution to reintroduce their natural predators.

If it is decided to keep them in check, then it should be done professionaly so as not to fuck the environment up even more. Remember passenger pigeons? They were so common that everyone thought “no way they’ll ever disappear” and used them for target practice. Oops! Guess they miscounted. Same thing could happen with any species, even one that breeds like rabbits. What do I mean by professionally? Well, to start, not by someone who arranges their kills into naughty words and proudly takes pictures with them. That’s just stupid. Anybody who does that to dead bodies, regardless of species, is not mature enough to care about the repercussions of their actions.

To use a metaphor – if you need somebody to, say, chop down part of a forest so that in the event of a wildfire the flames don’t spread to surrounding neighborhoods, then you get woodcutters who would select the trees that present the most danger and harvest the resulting wood for lumbermills. You would not put a couple of rednecks in a tank and let them roll over whichever trees they happen to hit and then let them make a giant phalus out of the resulting splinters.

@Nemo
think of the cost involved with involving professionals to deal withth problem. they would be run off their feet trying to do what an individual could do in one day. the backlog of rabit culls would become intolerable and people would get pissed off about the growing rabit problem. no one wants to pay someone to do something they can do themselves with some bullets and a gun. or where i live in aus with a gasoline tank and a match. its to much of a problem to invole companies or institutions from the private or a governmental sector because thye would end up another underfunded entity sucking on tax payer dollars.

you have contradicted yourself here and you do not need to use procrastinated explanations to explain yourself, your point imo has become invalid.

But maybe, Nemo, the woodcutters while working solelmly would have giant fuck the earth mother phalli in their secret disrespectful hearts.

Looking at the goose sign, it seems to be a “fuck you PETA, we like to HUNT, like MEN, DAMMNIT” message theme.

Obviously they’re keen hunters and feel passionately about their past-time. Most hunters are responsible people, not cruel and wasteful.

I can understand how you find the apparent disrespect to the corpses upsetting, nemo, but to my way of thinking it’s how they were killed that matters. Cleanly and not cruelly, not wastefully. After that, they’re just dead meat.

@ausi dudes: Well that’s different. Deer and rabbits are natural here.I’m saying they’re all over the place. So what if you hunt a few. The hunters eat the meat and make rugs out of the deerskins.

I would have a problem if deer were endangered, but hunting is very, very very heavily regulated in BC. If you went past your license eventually you would be caught and quite likely it would be another hunter turning you in. Hunters here are often the most passionate and realistic conservationists. They don’t want their forests vanished or the game thinning out.

I’m not sure how I contradicted myself there. My point is that there is a difference between professional and conservationist hunters and people who have big guns to shoot furry things with. Hunters might pose with a trophy kill, yes, but I highly doubt any self-respecting hunter would be caught spelling things out with it. It’s not the hunting that annoys me, it’s the (in my opinion) obvious disrespect for what they’re hunting. Yes, the rabbits are, at the time of the photo, just corpses, and it doesn’t really matter to them what happens after they’re dead. Point is, such behavior is still ethically repugnant and you can’t expect people that act disrespectfully toward their kills post factum to treat the responsibilities of their past-time any differently. They’re more likely to be the modern equivalent of the types that mowed down buffalo out of moving trains and then took photographs on veritable mountains of skulls.

I realize many will disagree with me (and already have), but my disgust for this sort of macabre humor did not let me sit silent.

Splinter you are full of shit. You’re not a psychiatrist. No psychiatrist would make a diagnosis based on a blurred out, possibly photoshopped picture. Especially one that is so clearly a value judgement.

@Richard: In australia they are basically destroying the entire environment and aren’t native. Don’t be a misanthropist or a dumbfuck. Oh, and you’re not profound either. Just about every 14 year old has had that little insight.

@Richard
Wild rabbits don’t live to a ripe old age and pass away quietly at the nursing home surrounded by family. There are only a few ways that a wild rabbit dies
a) starvation
b) predator
c) disease
d) run over by a car,tractor,etc. (harvest on farms is a bunny holocaust)
e) killed by hunters
Out of those possibilities, yes, (e) is the most humane.
Here’s another hit from the cluebat: animals don’t have feelings like humans. A rabbit has a brain the size of cashew, that’s not enough neurons to do much more than run, eat and fuck. There is no moral equivalence to humans.
agreed about splinter, unless by “psychiatrist” you mean “psychology major” and by “psychology major” you mean “community college drop-out”.

i await the day some alien species comes and says they’re just humans they are missing something in their brain its ok all they can do is run, eat, fuck, think about abstract things, and endlessly ridicule each other

Lol! I’d believe you if you said you were a rabbit psychologist, Splinter.

Nemo, I think the messages measure more the depth of the hunters contempt for PETA than they do the lack of respect for the animals (corpses at that) you’re reading from what is, after all, just a couple of pictures. I might be wrong, of course.

Unless we asked the hunters themselves, we don’t know what their practices and ethics are.

It’s so easy for city people to act all high and mighty because they are so disconnected from the basic facts about reality and their own knowledge of country comes from fucking “documentaries” like mythbusters.

I love animals, I love the forest. I am in every way a conservationist. But I’m not a retardo. I realize that there are complex issue to people’s survival. You don’t get a city fed by being picky about ever little vole. It’s terrible but guess what? Even if you are a vegan it’s keeping you alive, as Reboot pointed out the harvest kills all kinds of animals that get in the way, but to feed a city using a scythe just isn’t possible..

And introduced species do destroy the local environments and need to be killed. Killing a few rabbits that ended up in the wrong place nothing compared to the desertification that could cause. If you want to pay to move those rabbits by plane to a more proper environment, shell it out yourself man because I don’t got that kind of dollars. I’m already taxed like crazy here in BC and most of that goes to maintaining nature and protecting threatened species, believe it or not.

If you can think of a human solution to all of these problems, be my guest. I would love to hear that. But just bitching and talking about aliens wont fix anything and it makes out look like a retarded.

@asdf
We don’t need to wait for aliens to show up for examples of atrocities against other humans because they are “inferior”, do we?
That’s part of what truly pisses me off about so-called “animals rights” advocates. If we lived in a perfect, sunshine world where shit like Iraq and Darfur wasn’t going on everyday, maybe I would give a fuck about some bunnies.
But more men,women and children have been brutally murdered today than there are rabbits in this picture; and you all get your panties in a bunch because its “disrespectful”.

We, in the last few hundred years, managed to fuck up the natural balance all over the world, us humans, and we – sorry, PETA – can’t just step away and let the imbalance run its course.

That means culling animals that thrive in the imbalance, so as to have something left instead of desert.

I think we should stop farming sheep and cattle here (the country’s so damn fragile), and farm roos and emus, but that’s going to be a long time coming. Ways of life to be maintained and all, change is slow.

I hate seeing pictures of the buffalo kills, nemo. It (call me a hippy!) makes me want to cry. Every species lost is a tragedy.

Oh, buffalo are back in Canada though. I guess it was tough going there for a while. But now you can go out to buffalo ranches (which are gigantic) and see herds of dozens of buffalo running around. Very humane, too.